This Damon Runyon-like work will be around well into the Twenty-first Century to inform future chess generations about such greats as Bobby Fischer and world champion Gary Kasparov as well as the "guys and dolls" of the New York chess scene during the fabled Golden Era of the 1930s and 1940s. In the Introduction, five-time U.S. Champion Larry Evans writes that the authors capture "some of the most raucous and colorful figures in 20th Century chess" with a "Dickensian precision." Yet there is plenty of hard chess in this big book - over 300 games and positions, many never before published, and which contain interesting opening ideas that have either been forgotten or neglected in the manuals.

Grandmaster Arnold Denker is known as the Grand Old Man of American Chess. In this memoir, GM Denker - who was U.S. chess champion from 1944 to 1946 - skillfully intertwines with his own life the stories of great chess men whom he knew and loved. Denker, who is renowned as a chess raconteur, was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1993. His co-author is Larry Parr, a former Editor of Chess Life (1984-1988). Mr Parr has received more individual awards for excellence from the Chess Journalists of America than any other chess writer.